p-e-w

10 ms·

211.
by p-e-w 4mo ago
There are many, many tech jobs at many companies (at least there used to be, until very recently). “I work for one of the most evil institutions on the planet today because it is the only way I can support my sick parents” is an absurd excu
212.
by p-e-w 4mo ago
Yes. There will be a few high-profile incidents, and then institutions will be forced to stop performing administrative actions based on people’s word.
213.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Not to mention that where heavy computation is required, Python often has libraries that are much, much faster than anything you can quickly hack together in C or Zig.
214.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Plane travel is a very poor proxy for quality of life. Home ownership, high-quality food, working hours etc. seem far more relevant.
215.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Brain drain at an unimaginable scale, which is a self-reinforcing mechanism because once it starts, governments will usually impose restrictions to try to stop it, which makes everyone else want to leave too.
216.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
That hasn’t been true for decades in the West, even though per-capita productivity has been steadily rising since WW2.
217.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Not only that, he should clean house before lecturing others on any topic. By which I don’t mean that one needs to be perfect before giving opinions, but the current level of hypocrisy is pushing it.
218.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Why would they be careful, given that the chances of any serious consequences for ignoring such provisions are effectively zero?
219.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
I couldn’t believe my ears when I first heard that the second ever flight of SLS was going to be crewed. It worked out in the end, but I can’t imagine being so confident in a new system, no matter how much money and brainpower has been sp
220.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
But all of those 12 launches happened in just 3 years, and cost a tiny fraction of other major spaceflight development programs. For reference, SLS has been in development for 5 times as long, and cost 15-20 times as much, as Starship, and
221.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
It just boggles the mind how you can simply write a 3D program with a ready-made library today, instantiate tens of thousands of objects in 3D space, and the whole thing will render in real time on a phone without you ever having to wor
222.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
The Netherlands supports precisely those human rights that aren’t inconvenient for them. Just like every other country. There is no fundamental distinction here.
223.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Communication channels like Meta are a strict negative for human rights everywhere (including in the West), because they funnel all communication into a single channel that is easy to surveil and censor.
224.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Not true, there’s a third option: Stop operating in those countries. Which used to be a common choice for tech companies, until it somehow became unthinkable for some reason.
225.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
> But why would you expect to use WebKit to render rich text? Because rendering rich text correctly and consistently is one of the hardest problems in software. Bidirectional text, a million glyph shaping complexities, mixed content such
226.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
The amount of bullshit and blatant lies I’ve heard from my human teachers dwarfs the hallucinations produced by today’s LLMs.
227.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
A million times better than any human teacher I’ve ever had, for sure. Now I’m certain that there exist those mythical human instructors who can do better, but that’s not worth much if 99.99% of people don’t have access to them. Just like a
228.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
You’re right. Major supply chain attacks affect far more people than school shootings do, and can potentially cost more lives through downstream effects. It’s 2026. Software is critical infrastructure for global civilization now. Lives and
229.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
With the recent high-profile attacks on PyPI packages, it’s no longer true that npm is the “only package manager where this regularly happens”. In fact, pip is much more dangerous than npm because it lacks a lockfile. uv fixes that, but ado
230.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
> Some people are okay with using OrcaSlicer and printing through Bambu's cloud. It's convenient if you're on the road and want to start a print on your printer at home Do such people really exist? Are there actually peopl
231.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
When push comes to shove, the law stops mattering, every time. That’s true for individual rights and it’s true for corporate entities too. The era where things like that don’t happen is a very small slice of human history that is currently
232.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
I’d say that if Google suddenly stopped providing Gmail for free, destroying the primary means of communication for billions of people, governments would be justified in immediately nationalizing Google with no compensation. Corporations ar
233.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
> tended to have an Enders Game psychology of feeling both inferior and superior at the same time I’ve read Ender’s Game about 20 years ago, but I don’t remember that being a theme in the novel. Could you elaborate what you mean here?
234.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
> The largest EU benefit is that it makes democratic and rule of law backsliding unlikely. On the contrary. Since the EU has no meaningful penalty mechanism other than withholding funds, and enormous capacity for shared damage absorption
235.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
I guess what surprises me the most is that it’s even legal for schools to outsource the core of what they do to some random tech company. Either way, they were under no obligation to adopt this garbage technology regardless of whether it’s
236.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Whoa, if that is even remotely accurate then the talk about agents is a complete red herring.
237.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Yup. That post is a typical example, symptomatic of modern technology culture, of calling for humans to change their nature in response to technology. This is a fundamental mistake. It’s always the job of technology (indeed, its most import
238.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
Not to mention that manually writing code is itself a process of understanding. It cannot be replicated by reading code, no matter how carefully.
239.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
> The models now whaste a vast amount of useless neurons memorising the character count the entire English language No they don’t. They only need to know the character count for each token, and with typical vocabularies having around 250
240.
by p-e-w 5mo ago
I don’t agree with that definition of “hallucination”, for starters.

More ›